Google had a really big week this week. It started Monday evening when Google VP of Engineering in charge of mobile, Andy Rubin sat in the hot seat with Wall Street Journalist writers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg as part of their Allthingsdigital, D: Dive Into Mobile event in San Francisco. While leading up to the event we were all expecting Rubin to drop both Gingerbread and the Nexus S device however Samsung issued a press release earlier in the day releasing both.
What we did get was a sneak peak at Honeycomb and a new Motorola tablet with an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. This buttonless tablet showed off the tablet, two pane, version of gmail and the 3d version of Google Maps. During the interview Swisher and Mossberg asked Rubin a barage of questions about Apple and the competitive landscape and for the most part Rubin either deflected or spoke positively.
One of the key points in the interview was when Rubin eluded to the fact that Android was for “early adopters”. While that was true of teh G1, The Nexus 1 and possibly the Nexus S, the ecosystem has fallen very mainstream.
Andy Rubin also made his second tweet ever reporting that Android was up to 300,000 phone activations per day.
Finally Chrome OS gets launched retail gets pushed back.
On Tuesday just down the road from the allthingdigital soiree Eric Schmidt and the Chrome OS team launched Chrome OS at a press event in San Francisco. The announced it via a new netbook called the CR-48 which is being released soon under the brand name Google. In addition to the press in attendance Google is sending out thousands of test netbooks across the country in hopes of creating some more buzz (But not google buzz)
Were you one of the lucky people to get on the CR-48 Beta?
Eric Schmidt Almost CEO of the Decade.
Eric Schmidt’s background is in technology, having worked at one time for Bell Labs, Xerox and Sun Micro Systems and then becoming CEO at Novell. He is also more academic and technical and less a mouthpiece. He’s definitely got the brains and strategy but unfortunately Marketwatch.com fell for Steve Jobs’ show and made Jobs CEO of the decade.
Schmidt joined the likes of Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Cummins Tim Solso, and of course Steve Jobs as Marketwatch.com’s finalists for CEO of the decade.
Source: Marketwatch
Streetview Data Collection Under Fire Again
The Attorney General of Conneticut, Richard Blumenthal, is calling for the release of all of the data collected by Google’s street view teams while in the state of Conneticut. Google came under fire earlier in the year when it was revealed that in addition to photos and GPS info, streetview information gathering teams also acquired visited URLs as well as personal email addresses.
When that original problem was brought to Google’s attention they quickly enacted better privacy policies and allowed the Federal Trade Commission to look into their data collection policies. The FTC gave Google a clean bill of health and the problem was thought to go away.
Two sides have quickly formed in this argument the government side headed by Governors like Blumenthal, and not Google but the people. Blumenthal and other government officials want carte blanche access to the data Google collected during their street view gathering, however a group of concerned Americans feel that their personal information is actually safer if Google doesn’t turn it over to the government. We’ll keep an eye on this one…
Source: Seerpress
